A report from VG247 claims confirmation from multiple anonymous sources that a new developer kit model of Sony's next generation PlayStation console will soon be making its way out to supported, NDA-gagged, third party studios.

According to the report, the new information came out of a disclosure meeting earlier in the week where the platform holder roughly framed the capabilities of their planned new console, referring to it only as the rumoured codename PlayStation Orbis, and never PlayStation 4.

Housed in a standard PC case, the latest dev kit hardware is said to be based on AMD's A10 APU (Accelerated Processing Unit, which is a combined CPU/GPU), will still feature a Blu-Ray optical drive, and come standard with a 256GB harddrive --although it was not known whether that would be a solid state drive or not. The dev kits will also feature 8GB or 16GB of RAM, though dev console hardware traditionally has more memory than the consumer product, so it's difficult to speculate what we might expect in the launch console.

Sony are said to be targeting performance that can run 1080p games at 60 frames per second with "no problem", reportedly using the words "today and tomorrow's market", however the words "very affordable" were also quoted, which would be in contrast to the PS3's premium launch price.

In terms of timeline, the report explains that Sony is expected to make a formal announcement on the new console before E3 2013 next June, and final spec consoles are supposed to be arriving to developers around this time also. Whether that provides enough time for a 2013 holiday season launch seems unlikely, but perhaps possible, although it could just be an early announcement to talk some wind out of potential competitors. Previous rumours have speculated on a 2014 launch for the next PlayStation.